September 24, 2010 – 9:50 am
Almost every ornithopter I’ve seen has been clunky and mechanical. This one moves like a heron instead. Now… imagine that this was a place with less gravity or thicker air…
September 6, 2010 – 2:57 am
Dude knew what he was talking about. Note that he misses the killer app, though: pure social interaction.
September 2, 2010 – 1:45 pm
BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels from françois vautier on Vimeo.
August 26, 2010 – 12:46 pm
There’s an earlier, crappier version of this, and a later, better edit, and I don’t know which one this is. But man, this movie’s good, and the comic is even more wonderful in the ways you’d guess. I think it’s probably still too scary for my niece, who’s excited about Totoro and the nonscary parts [...]
August 10, 2010 – 12:55 am
I’m really excited to get to see this. $30000 of funding made this entire series (of which $27k+ has been raised — if you like it, donate!). This is the future of media, everyone. Artists making money making art. I hope it works. I might just fire up Kickstarter to make sure I can afford [...]
My favorite quote from this article, discussing the spontaneous market crash last April: The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent [...]
I’m just now writing the Quantum Computation section of Human Contact, and lo and behold, there’s a really weird article on io9 today about a novel — and frankly paradigm-reshaking — use of the (still impractical) technology. Quantum computing is interesting for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that it can solve [...]
Penny Arcade just started a really neat Automaton story. As before, it’s largely about Carl, an automaton living in 1927 America, with the Issue of racial segregation. It’s got a lot of shout-outs to Caves of Steel, which is a good move, but says a lot more about the ugliness of humanity than Asimov could [...]
A robot learning to flip pancakes from Sylvain Calinon on Vimeo. This starts off very funny. The ending is interesting, but the beginning is wonderful.
Since Delia Derbyshire‘s initial treatment of the title theme, each version has gotten slightly worse. It’s what happens when a creative experiment is successful, I suppose: rather than learning from it to do more creative experiments (which are often unsuccessful, after all), subsequent creators often just kind of polish up the remaining artifact to try [...]
